In storage technology, use of mass data storage facilities to provide data storage as a backup to mitigate the impact of data loss is well known. In order to improve storage capacity, many different deduplication techniques have been developed in which duplicated data is removed and a pointer to previously stored data is stored in its place. One deduplication technique includes inline dedupe processing in which data is passed to a dedupe process which compares data items or blocks of data (such as files or parts of files) with existing stored data to remove duplications of data before it is passed to the backup storage. Another technique includes post dedupe processing in which data items are first stored and then deduplicated after the backup is complete.